Excess Baggage - 27/02/2010

Zoologist and conservationist Mark Carwardine talks to John McCarthy about his life travelling to film, photograph and write about creatures which inhabit the deepest oceans or the dustiest plains. In 1990 he went in search of animals nearing extinction with Douglas Adams and more recently with Stephen Fry and, as an occasional leader of wildlife expeditions, he shares his thoughts on the ethics of animal tourism, ecology and the environment. John also meets Robin Bayley, who went to Mexico in search of traces of his great grandfather who went to work there and, according to family legend, consorted with bandits and had to hot-foot it back to Britain during the revolution of 1910. Robin not only finds the pleasures of rural Mexico but more than he bargained for in terms of family history. And Mexican author and British resident Chloe Aridjis tells John about her perspective on her homeland from Europe and whether Mexico's Spanish heritage makes it in any sense culturally European.